Rick and Morty: Auto Erotic Assimilation Recap

Synopsis for 2×03: Rick reunites with his ex-girlfriend, the hive mind Unity, while Summer tries to convince its members to think freely. Jerry and Beth discover Rick’s secret lab under the garage.

Rating: ★★★★☆

Rick lives in the present. He embraces new opportunities wherever they appear and pushes himself to new limits constantly. He doesn’t worry about the past or the future – it’s only his greed and narcissism that prevents him from reaching an almost spiritual level of living in the now. So even though he’s clearly a character with an incredibly bizarre and eventful past, we haven’t heard anything about it until just now.

In “Auto Erotic Assimilation,” we meet Unity, a collective hive mind who propagates by assimilating organisms and plans to eventually overtake the entire universe, and who also happens to be Rick’s ex. Unity was only the size of a small town when they first met, but now its taken over an entire planet. Rick quickly goes back to old habits, and the two of them hook up almost immediately – and in this case, “hooking up” qualifies as banging any member, or any number of members, of the entire species, allowing Rick to live out all his wildest fantasies with ease.

Meanwhile, the remaining members of Unity are left to distract Morty and Summer, but Summer is disturbed by the enslaving of the entire population. She takes her protests to the streets and tries to convince people to break back into their own bodies with rather little success – as Unity points out, world peace has been achieved, the planet’s productivity is higher than ever, and many of the bodies belonged previously to sex offenders and drug addicts. Of course, Summer gets her wish when Unity gets too caught up partying with Rick and accidentally allows some of her bodies to return to their normal selves… which leads to a race war almost instantly.

Meanwhile, in a rare C plot for the show, Beth and Jerry are looking for a weedwacker in Rick’s garage when they find a secret hatch leading to an additional underground lab, where Rick has some sort of alien monster locked up. Jerry sees this as cause to kick Rick out for good, while Beth defends her grandfather, insisting that the monster may be locked up for the protection of others.

When the monster finally escapes and steals a translator, it turns out that both of them are sort of right: the alien does eat babies, but Rick did capture him to cure a highly infectious disease it carries, although he only planned to do so in order to make millions off the cure. But none of that matters, because the alien decides to leave Earth and never come back after tortuously hearing Beth and Jerry argue for so long about Rick when their problems were clearly more with themselves.

The “morals” of these side stories come easily enough. Beth and Jerry clearly have issues they need to work out within themselves and between each other rather than fighting about Rick or anything else. Meanwhile, Unity assures Summer that she didn’t do anything wrong, but Summer gains a renewed faith in things as they were. Having been on a lot fewer of these adventures than Morty (who seems pretty indifferent to most of these events as they develop; “Ah Summer, first race war, huh?”), she still needs to realize that most of the universe doesn’t run on the same morals and principles that she does.

Rick’s relationship with Unity, meanwhile, has layers you could peel away for days. Rick seems to view the world with a nihilistic acceptance that allows him to profit off the inadequacies and evils of the universe without guilt. Unity, on the other hand, has larger goals and desires and believes it has the power to legitimately change that flawed universe for the better. Despite this, their chemistry is clear – they both have a “bigger picture” mindset and such large individual personalities that they need another person of equal scale. But ultimately, Rick can have an entire planet at his fingertips and still get bored, whereas Unity can’t accomplish her plans with Rick holding her back. In a sense, we’ve all known a couple with this dynamic, but Rick and Morty puts it together in original and unexpected ways.

This episode doesn’t quite earn a perfect rating if only because it’s not quite as funny as the last, though moments like Rick forgetting the word for “human” and the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Community reference stand out. But it’s great to see that the show’s second season remains as creative and thematically resonant as its first so far.